In a world that’s gone digital, it’s no surprise that so have our assets. Protecting digital assets is crucial to maintaining an organization’s operations and revenues, whether it’s sensitive personal identifiable information (PII), business data, or intellectual property. Online threats rapidly evolve to employ complex counterfeiting and spoofing of digital assets and new means to break down the software gates they hide behind.

Read also: a hacker-for-hire arrested in the UK, the BTC-e mastermind pleads guilty, and more.

The manufacturing landscape is undergoing a digital revolution, driven significantly by Industrial IoT (IIoT), cloud adoption, and remote access needs. These advancements enable manufacturing companies to unlock efficiency gains, optimize operations, and enhance collaboration, but they also introduce a raft of new cybersecurity challenges. Legacy equipment and complex network setups have always made it difficult to secure manufacturing environments.

In part 1 of this series, we covered a lot of ground including the three converging trends that point to the need for an attack surface management (ASM) solution – the growing attack surface, attackers having more opportunities and tools to infiltrate the attack surface, and manual SecOps being slow and ineffective. We also outlined the key features you should be looking for when selecting an ASM tool.

In April 2024, a significant breach rattled the financial sector as HSBC and Barclays, two prominent banking institutions, fell victim to a data breach. The breach occurred within the infrastructure of a direct contractor working for both banks, sending shockwaves through the industry and raising concerns about the security of sensitive financial data.

Sequels, bah! Usually, they are never as good as the first. Do not even speak of prequels! This is less of a sequel, and rather should be considered a continuation of the first blog. In line with the original blog, there will be a few references to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. So, without further ado, you have my sword, and you have my bow, and my axe, or, at the very least, some of my NIST CSF 2.0 insights.

Using open-source code exposes organizations to a tremendous amount of risk, yet this point is treated like a dirty little secret that nobody talks about. So, let’s live on the edge and take a minute to talk about the problem. Open-source code is an oddity. Generally, open-source code is often placed in small packets tucked inside massive programs that corporations use to run their most important processes or it is adopted as a whole program and tasked with running some part of a business.